In the wee hours of 13 August 1961, the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) quietly began to build a barbed-wire and concrete-block Antifascistischer Schutzwall or so-called “antifascist bulwark” along the dividing lines between East Germany and the surrounded city of West Berlin.

Officially, the purpose of the Wall was to prevent “fascists” entering East Germany; but its immediate and practical effect was to stanch the torrent of humanity pouring from the increasingly repressive and unsustainable GDR to West Berlin and West Germany. Legally and militarily, the Allied powers occupying West Berlin could do nothing, as the edifice being constructed stood well within the bounds of the GDR's own territory. They (and the people of both Germanies) had no alternative but to get used to it. Endlessly refined, improved and expanded over the ensuing decades, the Berlin Wall stood fixed and unperturbed in mute testimony to the "achievements" of Communism -- until the fateful day of 9 November 1989.

On that day, following weeks of mass demonstrations by restive East German citizens who were increasingly emboldened by the success of anti-Communists in Hungary and Poland; weeks that had seen the openly voiced refusal of the East German army and police to fire upon these demonstrators; and weeks that had seen the forced resignation of hard-line Socialist Unity Party (SED) leader Erich Honecker and his replacement by an ostensibly more "liberal" leadership; an official of the GDR's new government convened a press conference to discuss the pending relaxation of some - but only some - travel restrictions for GDR citizens. When asked by a reporter when these new regulations would take effect, the regime's spokesman (Gunther Schabowski by name) tentatively announced  - and with some bewilderment - "immediately, as far as I know." The people of the GDR were listening, and they took him at his word.

That night, ecstatic crowds swarmed the crossing points reserved for GDR citizens that led into West Berlin. Thousands strolled freely through the Antifascistischer Schutzwall to the other side as befuddled border guards, without orders to the contrary, stood by and let them pass. Other GDR citizens had bigger and more far-reaching ideas that night; they brought hammers and pick-axes along and began to feverishly chip away at the masonry of the wall itself. The GDR's once-feared border guards, realizing what miracle the people had wrought, got into the spirit of the moment themselves, grabbed some ladders and were soon atop the Wall shaking hands with smiling policemen from West Berlin. Less than a year later, for the ultimate good or ill of both Germanies, the GDR disappeared, swallowed whole as it were by the Western-aligned German Federal Republic.

In the end, it was the human element and the long-suppressed will of a put-upon populace that prevailed over a bureaucratic, monolithic state and its fearsome internal security forces, whose rank-and-file eventually remembered that they too were part of "the people" and chose to stand alongside their countrymen - and not their rulers - at the decisive moment. Leaders who go blissfully along as if they can ignore or defy the will of their own people forever are advised to remember the fate of East Germany.

In 1935, Lieutenant Colonel Konrad Goltz of the Luftwaffe - a supply officer based at the port of Kiel - was tasked with organizing rescue units to provide emergency coverage in the German coastal areas of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea. The Seenotdienst was born as a civil organization manned by both military- and civilian personnel, with a fleet of aircraft flying under civilian registration. Goltz augmented the effectiveness of this force by arranging for cooperation and coordination with Kriegsmarine air-units as well as with civilian lifeboat societies such as the German Maritime Search and Rescue Service (DGzRS, or "Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Rettung Schiffbrüchiger"). He also assumed administrative command over the "Ships and Boats Group" which was organized at Kiel by the Luftwaffe.

Early in 1939, in consideration of the increasing likelihood of war with Britain, the Luftwaffe carried out large-scale rescue drills that extended far out to sea. It was determined that German bombers operating from inland bases were hampered by their limited range, so airfields were constructed in coastal areas to extend the Seenotdienst's reach over the open waters of the Baltic- and North Seas. Additionally, as a result of these exercises, the Luftwaffe undertook to procure a fleet of purpose-built air-sea rescue seaplanes, finally opting for the Heinkel He 59, a twin-engine biplane with Dornier Do 18s previously used for naval reconnaissance was assigned to air-sea rescue, and two new bases were set up in Norway at Stavanger and Bergen, and one at Aalborg in Denmark. When the Netherlands and France fell to the German advance in May and June 1940, more rescue bases were put into operation. The Hague and Schellingwoude became rescue bases in the Netherlands, and Boulogne and Cherbourg in France hosted rescue units that were soon to be active during the Battle of Britain. In many cases, local rescue societies cooperated with the Seenotdienst. The Seenotdienst was officially absorbed into the Luftwaffe in July 1940, becoming Luftwaffeninspektion 16 (German Air Force Inspectorate 16) under the direction of Generalleutnant Hans-Georg von Seidel, the Quartermaster General of the Luftwaffe, and thus indirectly under General der Flieger Hans Jeschonnek, the Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff.

In July 1940, a white-painted He 59 operating near Deal, Kent was shot down and the crew taken captive because it was sharing the air with 12 Bf 109 fighters and because the British were wary of Luftwaffe aircraft dropping spies and saboteurs. The German pilot's log showed that he had noted the position and direction of British convoys—British officials determined that this constituted military reconnaissance, not rescue work. The British Air Ministry issued Bulletin 1254 indicating that all enemy air-sea rescue aircraft were to be destroyed wherever they were encountered. Revealingly, Winston Churchill later wrote "We did not recognize this means of rescuing enemy pilots who had been shot down in action, in order that they might come and bomb our civil population again." Germany protested this order on the grounds that rescue aircraft were part of the Geneva Convention agreement stipulating that belligerents must respect all "mobile sanitary formations" such as field ambulances and hospital ships. Churchill argued that rescue aircraft were not anticipated by the treaty, and were therefore not covered. British attacks on He 59s increased. The Seenotdienst ordered the rescue aircraft armed as well as painted in the camouflage scheme of their area of operation. The use of civil registration and red cross markings was abandoned. A Seenotdienst gunner shot down an attacking No. 43 Squadron RAF Hurricane fighter on July 20 Rescue flights were to be protected by fighter aircraft when possible.

In August, a few captured French and Dutch seaplanes were modified for rescue and attached to the organization. Some three-engined Dornier Do 24 flying boats that were built in the Netherlands, and eight French Breguet Br.521 Bizerte models were refitted with standard Seenotdienst rescue supplies. Further bases set up at Le Havre, Brest, St. Nazaire and Royan. More aircraft were brought under Seenotdienst command on an ad hoc basis, depending on the urgency. On May 22, 1941 in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Crete, a squadron of Do 24s was called upon to rescue survivors of the sinking of the Malta, some 1,000 rescue missions were flown by Do 24s, with many shot down. In saving Italian sailors from the invasion of Normandy in June 1944, the Luftwaffe pulled bases back to keep them from being overrun. Units of the Seenotdienst whose areas of operation were threatened by Allied activity were disbanded or reorganized into other groups with safer locations. For instance, in July 1944, while surrounded by the gathering to attack Brest, Seenotstaffel 1 that had been operating there since June 1940, with a southern detachment at Hourtin, was sent to Pillau on Baltic, and then redesignated Seenotstaffel 60 in August. In November 1944, the German leadership decided that the flying boat manufacturing resources could be put to better use elsewhere, and it ordered the Dornier factory to cease building Do 24s.

Aircraft used by this organization were:

• Arado Ar 196
• Arado Ar 199
• Breguet Br.521 Bizerte
• Cant Z.506
• Dornier Do 18
• Dornier Do 24
• Focke-Wulf Fw 58
• Focke-Wulf Fw 190
• Heinkel He 59
• Heinkel He 60
• Heinkel He 114
• Heinkel He 115
• Junkers Ju 52
• Junkers W 34

The Seenotdienst aircraft rescued 99 children and 14 adults in a single Sortie, carried by a Do 24, saved from orphanages threatened by the Soviet advance into Pomerania at the beginning of March 1945. The load was so great that the aircraft was unable to take off — instead, using the surface effect, wave-hopped back to base. During the same battle, six boats working with the Seenotdienst made repeated trips March 17–18 to a pier in Kolberg and evacuated 2,356 people. Thus ended the amazing history of the Luftwaffe Seenotdienst. This organization became the model for all postwar Air Sea Rescue organizations, and the Dornier 24 remained in service well into the early 1970's!

Dutch rescue aircraft belonging to the Noord- en zuid-Hollandsche Redding Maatschappij (NZHRM, translated North and South Royal Netherlands Sea Rescue Institution) and the Zuid-Hollandsche Maatschappij tot Redding van Schipbreukelingen (ZHMRS) were incorporated into the Seenotdienst during the occupation of the Netherlands. Their fast rescue boats were painted white and marked plainly with red crosses, but on at least two occasions they were strafed by Allied aircraft. Dutch civilian boatmen enjoyed good relations with the German authorities, and between 1940 and 1945, the they saved some 1,100 seamen and airmen.

Uniforms of the Seenotdienst were a mixture of civilian, military, Red Cross and even foreign clothing. Prior to the war a Merchant Marine style jacket, Jumper and cap were authorized with special insignia. After the war began in 1939 the organization was placed under military command and Luftwaffe and Naval Style uniforms were adopted. Consequently we see unusual variations of clothing such as Kriegsmarine (Naval) style middies being worn with Luftwaffe insignia!

By 1945 the Luftwaffe had nearly a thousand Nautical vessels in service ranging from crash boats, weather ships, Flak Barges to Motor Vessels. It's well documented that many Kriegsmarine garments were issued to Luftwaffe crews on Flak barges (like the flak sleeve qualification badge in gold on navy blue) as it was more economic for the Luftwaffe to purchase and reissue the correct garments through Kriegsmarine stores rather than develop its own models for such a small number of personnel.

Left, we see a very rare picture of such a Luftwaffe Soldier wearing a Kriegsmarine Sommeranzug white Naval jumper and trousers without the customary breast eagle, showing a Luftwaffe style rank chevron for an Unteroffizier embroidered in light blue thread on white being worn! The Airman / Sailor appears to be clutching a standard Luftwaffe style overseas cap known as a Schifftchen (little boat) in his left hand, but they were also known to have been issued from Kriegsmarine stores in matching white cotton cloth with Luftwaffe Eagle and cockade. 

History records that interest in so-called "spirit photography" arose shortly after the development of the camera. The nineteenth-century was the heyday of spiritualism, seances and countless attempts to "contact" the dead, or otherwise "prove" - through the use of what was then the cutting edge technology of the time - the existence of one of the oldest and most pervasive presences in European folklore and memory: Ghosts.

We take no position on the existence of "ghosts," nor can we assert with any degree of certainty that post-mortem survivals of human consciousness do not occur. Nevertheless, despite the numerous hoaxes that have been perpetrated upon a public that has an insatiable appetite for such curiosities (including the legendary but faked photograph of the "Cottingley Fairies" that was "authenticated" in 1922 by no lesser an authority than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), a tiny handful of bona-fide, otherwise inexplicable "ghostly" images have come down to us among the billions of photographs that have been taken since the dawn of photography.

The few "ghost" pictures that have withstood rigorous examination by photographic experts employing all the tools of modern science stand to this day as mysteries and curiosities that might - just might - be visual evidence of the existence of another world.

We ourselves, as military historians, always make wide use of vintage photos in our productions. Accordingly, we have examined thousands of images, rejecting most, but choosing the most interesting among them for acquisition and inclusion in our constantly-growing photographic archive. One particular, mildly interesting photograph we found a few years ago in an online auction had what appeared (at first glance) to be a noticeable technical flaw; we bought it anyway, since we liked the motif, were confident we could resolve the problem with digital editing and could not pass it up at its sale price of only a couple of Euros.

The photo duly arrived and was put aside for about two years, after which we finally discovered a use for it and began the routine task of its restoration. What we found when we scanned and enlarged it made it clear that this photograph was anything but "mildly" interesting or "routine."

Let us examine the image in question: The scans presented here are taken from the original, period photo in question - printed on wartime Agfa-Lupex paper and measuring 9.5 by 6.7 centimeters, including a scalloped white border - that was taken on one of the fronts of the Second World War by a German soldier and printed shortly thereafter. A cursory examination of the subject matter reveals several easily-observable attributes:

1) The Luftwaffe personnel in the frame (probably members of a Flak unit) appear to be sitting and standing in some sort of dugout or impromptu bunker of the type especially common on the Eastern Front.

2) The subjects appear to be anything but jovial, but instead wear expressions of fatigue, pensiveness and even somberness, such as might be expected following the death of a comrade in battle. Some of the men are singing, but we have no idea what they are singing.

3) The smoky, filament-like tendril in the center of the photo, while possibly being attributable to flaws in the lens or film, nevertheless shows depth and three-dimensional perspective. Coincidentally, its behavior adheres to classic descriptions of ectoplasm, a substance believed by spiritualists to be a physical relic of a disembodied spirit. Ectoplasm has never been scientifically proven to exist, nor has its alleged composition been identified, but manifestations of it have been claimed repeatedly in the literature of spiritualism. We remain agnostics on the matter, insofar as we have no idea if such a thing as ectoplasm actually exists. Yet the behavior of the tendril depicted in the photo is interesting: It seems to be reaching from (or to) the bunk shown in the upper right of the frame. Could this bed be a fallen soldier's former berth?

4) The man seated in the foreground is holding an animal mascot or pet - in this case a cat - that is staring intently (and directly) at the hovering white tendril, though it seems that none of the humans in attendance can see it. These disparate reactions are by no means inexplicable if we consider that many animals can see in a spectrum that differs considerably from that perceived by the human eye, and that cats, as crepuscular ambush predators, are gifted with particularly acute eyesight in environments dominated by darkness and shadows. The ancient reputation of cats as spiritual and mystical beings that persists to this day in European folklore only contributes to the mystery generated by the inquisitive behavior of this Flak soldier's alert feline companion. Incidentally, when we first acquired this photo, we were unaware that it even included a cat.

The questions that arise from all of the above observations are: Does this photograph record the “final farewell” of a recently fallen comrade to his fellow fighting men? Is it a legitimate photographic document of a  paranormal event? Or, was it taken with a camera that had a cracked lens, inside a cramped space with cigarette smoke in the air?

Not being experts in the field of photography, we cannot eliminate the many logical and prosaic explanations for the ghostly, filament-like, zig-zagging streak appearing in this image. We do note, however, that nothing resembling it appears in a catalogue of common film problems encountered by photographers using traditional, non-digital equipment. And we are still left with the question: What does the cat find more "interesting" than the photographer standing a few feet away from its face?

Nevertheless, being just as innocent of the mysteries of the "spirit world" (belief in which has figured in all cultures since the beginning of human history) as we are the deeper technical intricacies of photography, we cannot say conclusively that this photograph does NOT depict something from beyond our normal, everyday reality....

Happy Halloween!

He received his initial musical education at the Musikschule at Camburg an der Saale and began his military career in 1896 as a fifer in the band of the 8. Rheinisches Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 70 at Saarbrücken. In 1902, Stieberitz enrolled in Berlin's Royal Academy of Music as a Musikmeister candidate; he completed this training on 29 July 1905, and on 1 May 1906, he was promoted to Stabshoboist and appointed Music Director of the Band of the Danziger Infanterie-Regiment 128 at Danzig, West Prussia. He held this position throughout the First World War, returning to his garrison with the rank of major for the demobilization of his regiment on 16 December 1918. 

After briefly serving as music director of Infanterie-Regiment 101 of the Reichswehr (from which he was discharged in 1919), Stieberitz remained in Danzig and took over the job of conductor of the police band of the newly proclaimed “Free City of Danzig”- an entity which the Versailles powers had established as an extemporized solution to the problem of Poland's access to the sea. Stieberitz would remain in this post throughout the next two tumultuous decades of German-Polish relations, which included the economically-driven tensions of the late twenties, the temporary German-Polish detente of 1934, the emergence of the NSDAP as the leading factor in Danzig politics and the increasing German-Polish friction of the late thirties - which culminated in the return of Danzig to the Reich, only to be followed by the war years and, finally, the catastrophic end of the  German East in 1945.

Throughout the twenties, Stieberitz  - who was promoted to Obermusikmeister in 1920 - and his band (which was officially established on 9 April 1920 as the Kapelle der Schutzpolizei Danzig) provided military music to the government of the Free City for its ceremonial- and state occasions. That they performed this function superbly is perhaps unsurprising, given that their complement included numerous veteran musicians drawn from the band of the former Infanterie-Regiment 128. What is certain is that the ensemble quickly earned recognition as one of the foremost German military orchestras then in existence, though the "state" it served was no longer "in" Germany and was caught in an unprecedented and tragic situation. Danzig was a once-thriving port that had been politically severed from its economic hinterland; a "country" that was defended only by police forces; a polity governed by an elected Senate subject to the dictates of a League of Nations High Commissioner; and it was a "state" with foreign military personnel garrisoned at the entrance of its commercial harbor, in compliance with a treaty signed under duress.

As might be expected, this situation did much to  inflame nationalist sentiment within the Free City and its environs. Stieberitz followed a path that had already been trod by many before him when he joined the NSDAP on 1 May 1933 (his party membership number was 2.232.447). Incredibly, he was soon denounced for having alleged “non-Aryan” antecedents by Hans Brückner and Christa-Maria Rock, the joint authors of "Jewry and Music: With an ABC of Jewish and Non-Aryan Musical Zealots," an encyclopedia of "racially suspect" musicians that was published in Munich in 1935. As a result, Stieberitz was temporarily put on hiatus, though he was eventually fully exonerated of these "charges" and reinstated. As an aside, it should be noted that the editors of this hysterical compilation, which was rife with false and libelous denunciations, were cited as defendants in no fewer than eighty-six civil actions and complaints (some of which were forwarded to the President of the Reich Chamber of Music) that were initiated by persons whose reputations they had compromised.

Following this ludicrous interregnum, Stieberitz resumed his work; on 20 June 1936, he and his band participated in a concert presented at the posh seaside resort of Zoppot (which lay within the boundaries of the Free City) that featured operatic stars from the Teatro alla Scala of Milan. The following year, they returned to Zoppot to perform on the “Tag der Deutschen Militärmusik,” an occasion which saw Stieberitz and his musicians playing alongside visiting Musikkorps from the Reich. Busy and much in demand, the Danzigers' lenghty 1937 tour of Germany had concluded a mere ten days before this event, and it included appearances in Berlin, Breslau (where they performed at the Deutsches Sängerbundfest in the presence of Hitler), Guben, Görlitz, Leipzig, Halle, Dresden and Schneidemühl.

On 20 April 1938, Stieberitz conducted the newly-renamed Musikkorps der Schutzpolizei der Freien Stadt Danzig in the first gala concert to be held in the Free City in honor Adolf Hitler’s birthday - an event which indicates the extent to which the NSDAP had achieved preeminence in Danzig by that time. On the day of that first Führer-Geburtstagskonzert, Stieberitz was promoted Hauptmann der Schutzpolizei.

By the summer of 1939, Polish-German relations had broken down and war seemed increasingly likely. On 1 September 1939, the battleship Schleswig-Holstein began shelling the Polish garrison at Westerplatte, the ammunition depot at the mouth of Danzig's sea harbor; simultaneously, personnel of the Danzig Schutzpolizei (along with the SS-Heimwehr 'Danzig') launched an attack on the city's Polish Post Office, while the Schutzpolizei's port security detachment moved up to join the forces besieging Westerplatte.

Stieberitz and his band soon found themselves providing musical accompaniment to the mass-celebrations surrounding Adolf Hitler's triumphal entry into Danzig on 19 September 1939, an event followed by his speech in the city's Renaissance Artus-Hof in which the Führer proclaimed the end of the Polish state and proffered peace to the Anglo-French alliance.

After the end of the Polish Campaign, Danzig (and the eastern regions of the Reich as a whole) settled into a routine that had many of the attributes of peacetime. In his regular work, Stieberitz had long collaborated with the Sender Danzig, which broadcast his performances and compositions with considerable frequency before the war. This association continued after the autumn of 1939 with little interruption, and a considerable body of recorded material (much of it subsequently lost) resulted from these joint efforts. Even after his promotion to Major der Schutzpolizei in 1942, Stieberitz maintained a hands-on approach to his cooperation with the station's management; it is known that the last of his many broadcast performances featured the combined bands of the Schutzpolizei Danzig and the Wehrmacht-Kompagnie Danzig in a rendition of the Schwedischer Kriegsmarsch,  which was recorded in a special studio session on 17 July 1944.

Stieberitz had achieved widespread international recognition early in his career; his march Unter dem Gardestern became popular well before the First World War, even as far away as America, where it was recorded in 1914 by the United States Marine Band ("The President's Own") under its Hanoverian-born music director, William Santelmann. The greater part of his work, however, reflected the spiritual commitment he made when he consciously linked his personal- and musical destiny to that of the German East.

Much of Stieberitz's artistic output was dedicated to recalling the history and living heritage of the "Land of the Teutonic Knights." His compositions in this vein included his cavalry-fanfare march (in an apparent "Galopp" work-tempo) Am Tannenberg-Denkmal; the Danziger Landesschützenmarsch; Feste Pillau; Die Burg im Osten; Danziger-Standartenlied and Pillauer Matrosen. Stieberitz's Präsentiermarsch der Freien Stadt Danzig (also known as Dies Land bleibt deutsch), first broadcast over the Reichssender Königsberg in 1934, is not to be confused with another one of his compositions - a cavalry fanfare march - that is known by the same alternate title, but which bears no musical resemblance to it whatsoever.

Among his other notable marches were his driving Sommekämpfer; An der Rawka 1914-1915 (recalling a particularly grueling First World War engagement between German- and Imperial Russian armies in the Lodz region); the naval march Großdeutschlands blaue Jungen (1939) and Das grüne Korps (1942), a piece written in honor of the green-uniformed Danzig police among whom he had spent much of his career. Stieberitz wrote a total of sixty marches in all, as well as an operetta titled Der Weltmeister ("The World Champion") and incidental music for a presentation honoring the exploits of the Danzig 128th Infantry Regiment in the Great War.

As the armies of Soviet Marshal Rokossovsky closed in on Danzig in March 1945, all available forces, including the Volkssturm and the Schutzpolizei (with the personnel of the latter's Musikkorps among them), were mobilized by Gauleiter Albert Forster and thrown pell-mell into the desperate, last ditch defense of the ancient Frei- und Hansestadt.

At Danzig-Bohnsack on 27 March 1945, Ernst Stieberitz succumbed to severe wounds suffered in a ground attack by Soviet aircraft. The city where he spent most of his life, and to which he had devoted so much of his creative energy, fell to the Red Army on the following day. German Danzig vanished from the map, and from its ruins there emerged the Polish Gdańsk, which lay far to the east of postwar Germany's drastically redrawn and truncated borders.

The lands of the Teutonic Knights have disappeared and passed into history, perhaps for centuries, perhaps forever. Ernst Stieberitz, whose name and music will be linked with them for a long time to come, was not merely a man of a bygone era; he was a man of a bygone world.

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Brase entered the old army in 1893, and by 1906 had risen to the rank of Stabshoboist and Musikmeister of Infanterie-Regiment 13 at Münster. In 1911 he was appointed conductor of the 'Kaiser Alexander' Garde-Grenadier Regiment Nr. 1 at Berlin, one of the most prestigious positions in the world of German military music. A high point in Brase's career came in 1917,  when he conducted the massed-bands of the German army in a concert attended by the Kaiser, Generals von Hindenburg and Ludendorff and members of the General Staff.

Discharged from the service in 1919, Brase conducted a police band in Berlin until 1923, when the Minister for Defense of the Irish Free State, General Richard Mulcahy, invited him to Ireland to take over the military music branch and musical training of that country’s defense forces.

Arriving in Dublin on 1 March 1923, and accompanied by a friend and colleague who had performed with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (the professional musician Friedrich Christian Sauerzweig, a man who, like Brase, spoke very little English), Brase established the Irish Army's School of Music at the Curragh Camp in Kildare and began casting about for students. As an indication of the importance his superiors accorded to his assignment, he was commissioned with the rank of colonel, while Sauerzweig was commissioned captain.

From the best of his initial recruits, Brase assembled a band that was able to present its first recital before Mulcahy and the army staff a mere two months after his arrival. The Minister of Defense was well pleased with the performance of this ensemble, which was henceforth designated the Irish Army"s "No. 1 Band." Its musicians later made their first appearance before the general public in Dublin's Theater Royal on 13 October 1923; after their well-received debut, both the band and the Army School of Music were relocated to Beggars Bush Barracks in Dublin.

In total, Brase and Sauerzweig set up four Irish military bands in the period from 1923 to 1928. In 1925, the army's No. 2 Band was formed and allotted to the Southern Command at Cork; later establishments included the No. 3 Band (stationed at the Curragh) and the No. 4 Band, a training organization initially intended for the Western Command. A fifth band was later formed as a reserve, while six pipe bands were established and allocated to selected battalions. During this period, Brase and Sauerzweig also instituted a program of instruction for boy trainees in order to ensure a steady supply of musicians for the future.

Starting in 1924, the band toured widely throughout the country, presenting a series of well-received programs that included military marches, selections from the classics and Brase's own arrangements of Irish folk airs, the most successful of these being his Irish Fantasia No. 1; he is known to have written at least six such pieces. As conductor of the No. 1 Band, Brase's early gramophone recordings in Ireland attest to the high standard of skill and coordination achieved by the Irish musicians and their director within a comparatively short period of time. 

In 1927, Colonel Brase presided over an outdoor concert and tattoo in Dublin featuring three massed bands; repeated in 1929 and 1935,  this event - now dubbed the "Dublin Military Tattoo" - was staged with an increased musical complement that garnered considerable public acclaim for the grandeur of its spectacle and skill of its performers.

Fritz Brase quickly came to love his adopted land, and on at least two occasions he declined offers of prestigious musical appointments in Germany that would have entailed his permanently leaving Ireland. He was one of the founders of the Dublin Philharmonic Society Orchestra in 1927 and conducted this ensemble in its regular concerts, but he resigned in 1936 as a result of differences with its board. The Irish people were by then used to referring to him as "Fitz Brassy," and he continued his work as conductor of the No.1 Band and Director of the Army Music School.

In May 1935, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday and in recognition of his lifetime work in Germany and Ireland, Brase was officially awarded the title of "Professor" by Adolf Hitler; the honors were presented personally by the German envoy to Dublin, Wilhelm von Kuhlmann. At approximately this same time, Brase (an NSDAP member and leader of a de facto Ortsgruppe consisting of German expatriates) sought official permission from the army chief of staff to establish a branch of the National Socialist Party's Auslandsorganisation in Ireland; after receiving the cordial but firm answer that he must choose between the party and his work for the army, he resigned his political position in favor of the service.

Illness finally forced his retirement in 1940, and he was succeeded as Director of the Army Music School by Christian Sauerzweig, who was promoted from captain to colonel and remained in charge of that institution until 1947. Fritz Brase died within one day of hanging up his uniform; he was buried in Dublin's Mount Jerome Cemetery, with musical accompaniment provided by the No. 1 Band.

In addition to the acclaim he received for his best-known work, the march Große Zeit, Neue Zeit (AM I, 94) - which came in second in a Berlin musical competition in 1912 - Brase also achieved lasting recognition for his fanfare-march Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ, the German Luftwaffe march Himmelstürmer, the Irischer Armeemarsch, the General Mulcahy March, the Irish National March and his numerous orchestral arrangements of Irish folk music. Brase's contribution to Irish military band music continued to be valued by many in the Emerald Isle long after his passing, and his achievement was perhaps best appraised by Dr. Esmonde in the Dáil Éireann in 1952:

"When musical broadcasts were first organised in this country, under the late Colonel Fritz Brase, a German, he did not import a whole lot of foreign musicians. He recognized the fact that there was a fund of musical talent latent in the Irish people and he set out to develop that talent... I think it is a pity that his policy was not continued...."

This Pathé Newsreel of 1930 features Fritz Brase conducting the "No. 1 Band" of the Irish Free State Army in his aforementioned Irish National March, which is based on the Irish traditional airs O'Donnell Aboo, Shule Agra, The Boys of Wexford and Let Erin Remember.

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The melody of Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit (“Always Practice Loyalty and Sincerity”), which sounded from the carillon of the Potsdam Garrison Church every hour from 1797 to 1945, was composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) five years after the death of Frederick the Great. Its solemn and beautiful tones,  resounding warmly over the canals, tree-lined streets and tiled-roofs of Potsdam, were a comforting presence in the daily life of the venerable old Rezidenzstadt of the Prussian Kings.

From Wikipedia: "The Garrison Church (full name: Court and Garrison Church Potsdam, German: Hof- und Garnisonkirche Potsdam was a Baroque church in Potsdam and, until 1918, Parish church of the Prussian royal family. The architect Philipp Gerlach was commissioned by king Friedrich Wilhelm I to build the church for members of the court and for the soldiers garrisoned in Potsdam. It was consecrated on 17 August 1732 and was soon well-attended by both the civilian and military communities. Friedrich Wilhelm I was buried at his request in the crypt of the church in 1740. In 1786 his son, Frederick the Great, was buried there also, but against his will.

"The bell tower of the Garnisonkirche, a dominating structure, measured 88,4 meters and reached well into the street in front of it. Its side walls were interrupted by tall, narrow windows, while sculptures flanked the corners. A panel with gold lettering mounted above the main entrance facing "Broad Street" (Breite Straße) read, 'Friderich Wilhelm, King of Prussia, had this tower built next to the Garnisonkirche to the honor of God. Anno 1735.'

"The foundation of the bell tower was solidly built and tapered to the upper stories. The top story, built of oak, had lanterns and a copper-covered roof crowned with a weather vane. A Carillon, inherited from the first Garrison church consecrated in 1722, was augmented with five new bass tone bells produced by Paul Meurer. Choral music was played on the hour, alternating with secular music played on the half hour until the end of the 18th century. From 1797 until 1945, the musical order was changed to Bach's Lobe den Herrn (Praise the lord, oh my soul) and Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit from Ludwig Hölty, set to a theme Mozart composed for Papageno's aria in his final opera Die Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”). In between, short melodies - some played upon request - rang out over the city every few minutes."

The story behind this august hymn's melody is fascinating in its own right. As mentioned, it was Mozart who composed the air that became Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit for a scene in his opera Die Zauberflöte. This work, which premiered in 1791 a little more than two months before the composer’s premature death, is noteworthy for its combination of fairy-tale elements and its allusions to the tenets of freemasonry.

The Masonic overtones of the opera are especially significant in that Mozart himself was himself a member of “the craft,” having been initiated into the Masonic lodges “Zur Wohlthätigkeit” (“Charity”) in 1784 and “Zur wahren Eintracht” ("True Harmony") in 1785. In fact, the librettist of Die Zauberflöte, Mozart’s longtime collaborator Emanuel Schikaneder (1751-1812), was one of his lodge brothers. 

Though the melody that became Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit was first publicly heard in Papageno’s aria "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen" in Act 2, Scene 5 of Die Zauberflöte (which premiered on 30 September 1791 at Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden), it is not impossible that the tune was in prior use among Freemasons during Mozart’s lifetime - though the authorship of the "original" Masonic lyrics (if any) remains unclear.

What IS clearly documented is that a three-volume collection of Masonic songs titled Freimaurerlieder mit Melodien, compiled by Joseph Michael Boheim and printed by G.F. Starke of Berlin, was published in 1795 with the poem Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit, set to Mozart’s music, included among its contents. The fact that the reigning King of Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm II (1744-1797), was himself a mason - as was his uncle the Great King - is almost certainly relevant to that air’s addition to the carillon of that symbolic shrine of Prussianism, the Potsdam Garrison Church, in 1797. Mozart himself met and performed for Friedrich Wilhelm II on several occasions, and even dedicated his “Prussian Quartets” to him.

Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit’s opening notes were later used as station identification by the Deutschlandsender, one of the most important radio stations of the Third Reich.

The march Der Geist von Potsdam by Georg Pischel (which features Üb immer Treu und Redlichkeit in its trio, played on the celesta in simulation of the Garrison Church's carillon) is presented on our latest release, CD BH 0940 "Unter der Reichskriegsflagge" - ironically, by the band of the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler,’ the elite guard of the fiercely anti-Masonic National Socialist regime.

DAS LIED DER DEUTSCHEN

The "official" name of the German National Anthem is Das Lied der Deutschen,or simply, Das Deutschlandlied. The song is often called Deutschland ueber Alles,simply because those are the opening words of the first stanza. It is virtually unknown today that the expression "über alles", or "before all [others&91;" refers not to the conquest or enslavement of other countries or the establishment of German hegemony over other peoples, but rather to a call for all Germans to abandon their concept of being a subject or citizen of this or that principality or region (such as Bavaria or Prussia) and to realize the common bond they had with one another by simply being German.

This concept was considered "revolutionary" at the time the words were written in 1841, since loyalty to "Germany" was considered by the princelings and kings of the disunited Reich (divided into 40-plus separate states) to be disloyalty to themselves.This "All-German" idea was suspect because it was also associated with the rising middle classes and their suppressed Frankfurt assembly of 1848.

The song's words were penned by the teacher Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who had been a fervent supporter of German unity and republican government, and who, because of his activities on behalf of these causes, was forced to flee to the North Sea island of Heligoland, where the verses were actually written. The music is taken from the String Quartet in C major (the Kaiser-Quartet), Op. 76,3 of Joseph Haydn, composed in 1797. It was officially ignored during most of the Second Reich (1871 to 1918), which had no official anthem as such.

The Deutschlandlied's real popularity began with World War I, when it was sung on the battlefield by young soldiers from every Gau of the Reich who were thrown together against a common foe.

Ironically, Das Deutschlandlied did not become the official national anthem until declared so by President Ebert of the Weimar Republic in March, 1922.

Not surprisingly, during the next European War, the words "über Alles" were ruthlessly exploited by Allied propagandists.

Banned after 1945 by the victors, the Deutschlandlied is again the German national anthem, but only the third stanza is used. The first stanza is absolutely verboten, since it refers to the traditional ethnographic boundaries of Germany ("from the Maas [in Belgium&91; to the Memel [between the present day Kaliningrad area of Russia and Lithuania&91;, from the Etsch [on the Austro-Italian border&91; to the Belt [in Denmark&91;"). 

Likewise, the propagandistic mistranslation of the words "über alles" has now become accepted "truth", thus precluding their use.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, proposals were made to combine the hymns of the BRD and the DDR (the anthem of which was an officially commissioned postwar piece by the communist poet Johannes R. Becher and leftist composer Hans Eisler) to create a "unified" national anthem. 

At that point, musicologists made the ironic discovery that, in terms of rhythm and meter, the words of the former DDR' s anthem Auferstanden aus Ruinen (perhaps not accidentally) fit the musical score of the Das Deutschlandlied perfectly!

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The history of military music in Russia begins with the reign of the Tsar and Emperor Peter the Great (*1672-†1725). Following the death of his half-brother and co-ruler Ivan V, and his assumption of the sole power of the throne in 1696, Peter instituted a series of modernizations that extended to all aspects of Russian political, military, administrative, religious and social life. At this time, concurrent to a general reorganization of the army, the first Russian military bands in the modern sense were organized along German lines, which meant that fifes and drums (used for command-and-control functions) occupied the dominant position in Russian martial music. 

Indeed, Peter's favorite instrument was the drum; as a boy, he had personally banged out cadences for his playmates, who he organized into the “droll regiments” that became the basis of the first units of the Russian Imperial Guard. These formations, the Preobrazhensky- and Semenovsky Regiments, took their names from the royal estates near Moscow where the young Peter had rallied the sons of local nobles in his elaborate war games, and with them the first Russian regimental bands came into existence.

Whenever the Tsar dined at the Admiralty in his new city of Saint Petersburg (where, as a trained shipwright, he personally oversaw the construction of warships in the adjacent yards), his frugal midday meals of naval rations were accompanied by fifers and drummers who serenaded him from the Admiralty Tower. Likewise, whenever he hosted conferences of his generals and ministers at the spartan, Dutch-style palace he had built for himself nearby, army musicians provided musical accompaniment.

Following his victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709, Peter further influenced the development of Russian military music by ordering trumpets and timpani introduced to all army regiments, as well as to the fleet- and ship’s bands stationed at Saint Petersburg, Kronstadt, Archangelsk and Reval. In 1711, he further decreed that each army regiment be outfitted with a German-style oboe ensemble of nine- to eleven members each.

Emperor Peter I, "The Great" (*1672-†1725)

Following Peter's death, the army he had built continued to grow and develop its traditions. By the fourth decade of the eighteenth century, its musical instruments had begun to acquire an honorific significance in their own right, as was already the case in the various German- and other European armies of the period. It was during the reign of Peter’s niece Anna Iannovna (who ruled from 1730 to 1740) that the Russian tradition of awarding silver trumpets to distinguished military units originated. In terms of precedence, these instruments (which were often elaborately engraved) ranked third in a regiment's honors after medals and banners. 

The first examples awarded date from 1731, when Anna bestowed twenty silver trumpets and silver timpani to the Life-Guard Horse Regiment (the former Leib-Dragoner Regiment of Prince Menshikov that she had elevated to guards status the year before). The first silver trumpets to be conferred as actual battlefield honors, however, were awarded in 1737, when a battalion of the Life-Guard Izmailovskii Regiment received several for valor in the fighting for the Turkish fortress of Ochakov. Following the institution of the Order of Saint George in 1769, these instruments were henceforth emblazoned with this highest of all Russian military decorations. The very last silver trumpets awarded were conferred upon units that served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05; in the entire period between 1731 and 1917, these instruments were awarded to only 120 regiments, battalions or detachments of the Imperial Russian army and navy.

A uniquely Russian contribution to wind music dates from the reign of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna who ruled from 1741 to 1762: the “horn orchestra” or horn chorus. The first of these ensembles appeared in 1753 in Saint Petersburg on the initiative of Prince Semyon Kirillovich Naryshkin (*1710-†1775). Naryshkin, the head huntsman of the Imperial Court, directed the Czech Waldhornist Johann Anton Maresch (who had arrived in Russia in 1748) to establish a wind band with selected musicians from the Court Chamber Orchestra. They were trained to play thirty-seven specially-cast instruments of varying sizes, which were modeled on old Russian hunting horns; each instrument produced only one note, but their effect when played in unison soon attracted broad interest. The first public performance of Maresch's horn orchestra took place in 1757 at Izmailov, the Imperial hunting lodge near Moscow, and private horn choruses soon proliferated throughout the Russian Empire. 

Due to the disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars, as well as the invention of the valve in Germany in 1814, interest in Russian horn orchestras slowly waned, but in a deliberate bow to tradition horn bands were specially organized for the coronations of Tsars Alexander III (in 1883) and Nicholas II (in 1896). The last state performance of a horn band in Imperial Russia took place during a concert of the Court Orchestra in 1904 that was organized to celebrate the birth of the Tsarevich Alexey Nicolaevich, the only son and heir of the last Tsar. It appropriately concluded with the triumphal "Slavsya" chorale from M.I. Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar.

The short reign of Tsar Peter III (which lasted but a few days in 1762) was a brief interlude that influenced Russian military music but little. This grandson of Peter the Great was born in Kiel in 1728 as Karl Peter Ulrich, the son of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp, and he was brought to Russia in 1742 as the heir presumptive to the throne. Peter's personal eccentricities soon became notorious, but more significant was his bringing to Russia of his Prussian-style "Holstein-Korps" which ultimately amounted to fourteen regiments. Upon the death of Empress Elizabeth in 1762, the now Emperor Peter III announced plans to prussianize the uniforms, drill and training of the Russian Imperial Guard, as well as to introduce Lutheranism as a state religion to Russia. This, along with his withdrawal from the Seven Years War (1756-1763) and the ceding of the Russian territorial gains from that conflict to Prussia, precipitated a palace coup - led by the Imperial Guard - that resulted in his death and the proclamation of his wife Catherine as Empress.        

During the reign of Catherine II or "the Great" (which lasted from 1762 to 1796), the size of Russian regimental bands was increased, though without substantially altering the mix of instruments inherited from Peter's era. Martial music played an important role in the Russo-Turkish wars of this period, and it was Field Marshal Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov (*1729-†1800), that great captain of Russian military history who never lost a battle, who uttered the famous dictum: “Music cheers the hearts of the soldiers and keeps them in step. It doubles and trebles the strength of the army. I captured the Fortress of Izmail with unfurled banners and loud music.” 

Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin (later "Prince Tavrichevsky"), Catherine's general and paramour who in the Second Turkish War of 1787-1792 wrested the Crimea and north shore of the Black Sea from the Ottomans, was himself an ardent lover of music. The long-time patron of a host of favorite musicians and composers, after his victory at the Second Battle of Ochakov in 1788, Potemkin ordered a Te Deum performed in his bivouac which featured a large orchestra with trumpets and timpani, bells, a battery of cannon and a Russian horn band.  

Catherine's son and successor Emperor Paul I (who ruled from 1796 until his murder in 1801) loathed his mother and sought to vindicate his father, the murdered prussophile Tsar Peter III. As Tsarevich he had already rigorously trained and drilled his Prussian-style personal guard at his estate at Gatchina outside Petersburg. He now issued a staccato series of decrees that introduced Prussian drill - including the goose-step or Stechschritt - friderician mitres, Prussian-style uniforms and even Prussian pigtails to the whole Russian army. He also initiated the custom of conducting military parades on religious and state holidays, and since these too were based on the Prussian model, they were officially referred to as Vahktparady in the regulations. 

Paul at this time also ordered infantry regimental bands reduced in size and variety of instrumentation, in effect returning them to their earliest form of organization as fife-and-drum corps. These now acquired (in addition to their conductors) a drum major wielding a Tambourstock, another borrowing from Prussia. Paul’s reforms also limited Russian cavalry regiments and their squadrons to only one or two “Staff Trumpeters” (Shtabs-Trubachi) each; and apart from the Chevaliers Garde- and the Life-Guard Horse Regiments, which continued to deploy one kettle drummer each, the use of percussion instruments by mounted units was prohibited. 

Tambourmajor, Life-Guard Preobrazhensky Regiment. Reign of Emperor Alexander II.

During Paul I's reign, the Russian army’s Vechernaya Zorya ("Evening Tattoo") came into general usage. This ceremony, which served as the basis of the Prussian Grosser Zapfenstreich, involved the assembly of troops in regimental parade order with a military band and featured a choir that sang religious hymns, usually the prayer Kol Slaven (“How Glorious”) with lyrics by Mikhail Kheraskov and music by Dmitri Bortnyansky (*1751-†1825). Bortnyansky, a renowned composer of operatic and ecclesiastical music, was named director of the Imperial Court Chapel Choir in 1796 by Paul, and he would retain that office until his death in 1825. 

Bortnyansky's setting of Kol Slaven was used as the unofficial anthem of the Russian Empire from 1796 to 1816, and until the October Revolution of 1917, its melody sounded every day at midday from the carillon of the Savior's Gate in the Moscow Kremlin. During the Napoleonic Wars in 1813 the King of Prussia, in the company of his ally Tsar Alexander I, witnessed the Vechernaya Zorya while touring a Russian bivouac in Silesia, and on hearing the prayer he was so impressed that he ordered it adopted by the Prussian Army. With lyrics taken from the poem Ich bete an die Macht der Liebe ("I Pray to the Power of Love"), the melody of Bortnyansky's Kol Slaven was thus transformed into the prayer of the Prussian soldier.

The reign of Emperor Alexander I (*1801-†1825), Paul's son who reversed some of his father's "Prussian" army reforms while retaining many of the others, is best known for the Russian victory over Napoleon and the advance of Cossack armies to Paris - but the period also coincided with dramatic new developments in wind instrument construction and renewed imperial interest in military music. German musicians in particular would play a crucial role in Russian band music throughout the nineteenth century, beginning in 1802 with the arrival in Saint Petersburg of a wind ensemble consisting of the Bohemians Dörfeldt (who played first clarinet), Fischer (on second clarinet), Köhler (on oboe), Rudolph (on bassoon) and Fuchs (on French horn).

Anton Dörfeldt (*1781-†1829), the leader of the group who had been invited to the capital by Prince M. I. Kutuzov, immediately attracted the attention of the Tsar, who enlisted him in his plans for the modernization of the bands of the Russian army. Dörfeldt was ordered by Emperor to take over the reorganization and training of all the bands of the Russian Imperial Guard, as well as those of the Saint Petersburg military district. In 1809, Dörfeldt’s proposal for the establishment of an academy for the training of military musicians was approved, and the Alexander appointed him the first director of the newly-founded “Saint Petersburg Military Music School.”

Simultaneously, Dörfeldt began assembling the scores of all the Imperial Guard’s regimental marches, which he sorted and organized according to their function. This collection was then reprinted in a concise edition by the “Dalmas” firm of Saint Petersburg and issued to the bands of the Imperial Guard. He also expanded the march repertoire to include new slow- and quick marches for the guard’s everyday use, borrowing some from neighboring Prussia, and commissioning others from Russian composers such as Iosif Kozlovsky (*1757-†1831) and Alexei Titov (*1769-†1827), a gifted violinist who happened to be an army general. Dörfeldt further augmented the collection by rearranging works by Mozart and Glück and adding others by French and Italian composers, but mostly by writing many of its pieces – thirty one in all – himself. The final result was the “Imperial Russian Army March Collection,” which by 1815 included seventy distinctive works for both infantry and cavalry formations. Tsar Alexander gave a complete set of their scores to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, which would serve as a basis and inspiration for the Prussian Armeemarschsammlung of 1817.

Of all the pieces included by Dörfeldt in this collection, perhaps the most "durable" has proven to be the anonymous March of the Yegersky Regiments. Under the title Marsch der freiwilligen Jäger aus den Befreiungskriegen, this piece has traditionally been viewed as a German composition ever since it was added to the Prussian Army March Collection as AM II, 239 in 1911. In fact, there is evidence that the march was already in general use by the Russian army during the eighteenth-century campaigns of Count Alexander Suvorov. During the Napoleonic Wars, it was in fact known as the Suvorov March or, alternately, the March of Emperor Alexander, which suggests a Russian origin of the piece. It was listed under the title March of the Jäger Regiments from 1812-1814 in the 1901 edition of the Imperial Russian Army March Collection, and during the Second World War it was the only parade march in general use by both the Red Army and the Wehrmacht.

Russian military music in the first half of the nineteenth century was strongly influenced by another German, the Silesian Ferdinand Haase (*1788-†1851), who succeeded Dörfeldt as music director of the Imperial Guard in 1830. Haase’s résumé reads like a page from Tolstoy's War and Peace; already an established musician who had achieved a considerable reputation in Europe, he had served in Napoleon’s Grande Armee during its 1812 invasion of Russia and was taken prisoner by Cossacks during the great winter retreat from Moscow. 

Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich, Tsarevich and brother of the Tsar, had heard of Haase and was present on the battlefield when he was captured; he delivered this young musician from his guards and subsequently became his patron, eventually bringing him to Warsaw to serve as the bandmaster of that city’s Russian garrison when he was appointed governor of Poland in 1816. After the Polish Uprising of 1830, Grand Duke Constantine was dismissed from his post and Haase was transfered to St. Petersburg to take over the position of Kapellmeister of the Guards- and Grenadier Corps, where he remained until his retirement in 1850. 

Early in his Russian career, Haase created the arrangement of the March of the Life-Guard Preobrazhensky Regiment (which features the Lemberger-Lied in its trio) that has come down to us to this day. By the reign of the last Tsar, this tradition-steeped but anonymous composition, which is known to have been widely played in Russia since the early eighteenth century, served as the presentation march of the Imperial Russian Army and Navy. Haase also composed numerous new marches that were added to the Russian and Prussian march collections, and following his retirement, he was succeeded by the forty-year old Anton Dörfeldt the Younger (*1810-†1869), who served as director of the bands of the Imperial Guard and the Saint Petersburg Military District until 1869.

The early years of Emperor Nicholas I’s reign (which lasted from 1825 to 1855) witnessed the emergence of such key figures in the history of Russian music as Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Alexander Alabiev and Mikhail Glinka, which gave impetus to the creation of new and original works for brass band, particularly after the invention of the new and improved piston valve by François Périnet in 1838.

A Russian Line-Infantry Regiment and its Band. Reign of Emperor Alexander III.

In 1833, Tsar Nicholas ordered Count Alexey Fyodorovich Lvov (1799-1870), the violinist and army general who was his court composer and aide-de-camp, to compose new music to replace the air that since 1816 had served as the music for the Russian Empire's Anthem God Save the Tsar, namely Henry Hugh Carey’s God Save the King. The lyrics of God Save the Tsar (Bozhe Tsarya Khranii) date from 1815 and came from Prayers of the Russian People by Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (1783-1852), an officer and poet who served as tutor to the Tsarevich Alexander Nikolayevich, the future Tsar-Liberator Alexander II.

After some initial creative difficulties, the melody that would serve as the anthem of the Russian Empire for the remainder of its existence came to Lvov in the course of a single night’s inspiration; he succeeded in creating a work of majesty and power that was suitable for the army, the church and the people – indeed, for the entire realm. None other than the great Alexander Pushkin himself reworked Zhukovsky’s verses to adapt them to Lvov’s new hymn. It was the first national anthem in Russian history to feature music and lyrics by Russian authors.

Upon hearing its beautiful strains for the first time, Nicholas I ordered the work repeated several times. At the close of the final rendition, the Tsar - a stern and military-minded ruler who was to be vilified by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as the "Gendarme of Europe" for his crushing of the forces of revolution wherever they appeared - clasped the composer's hand with tears in his eyes and uttered the single word: "Splendid!" 

The public premier of God Save the Tsar took place on 6 December 1833 at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, where it was performed by a choir of one hundred singers and two military bands. At Christmas that same year, by the Tsar’s personal order it was performed by military bands in every hall of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg. A week later, the Emperor issued a decree declaring the anthem a “civil prayer” to be performed at all parades and official ceremonies. As was the case with the Preobrazhensky March, the most widely-used arrangement for military band of God Save the Tsar was created by Ferdinand Haase; it was the shortest anthem in the world at eight lines, and it remained the Russian Empire’s national hymn until the February Revolution of 1917.

Another patriotic song that figured prominently in Russian history and the repertoire of Russian military bands (both Imperial and Soviet) was likewise created during the reign of Nicholas I: Glory, Glory to our Russian Tsar (Slavsya, Slavsya nash russkii Tsar). Its words and music are taken from the triumphal chorus heard in the finale of Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka’s (1804-1857) nationalistic opera A Life for the Tsar, which premiered in St. Petersburg on 27 November 1836. Originally titled Ivan Susanin, it recounts the historical tale of a hero who, during the “Time of Troubles” in the seventeenth century, refused to disclose the whereabouts of the first Romanov Tsar to Polish troops dispatched to capture or kill him so they could place a Polish impostor on the Russian throne. Feigning friendship for the invaders, Susanin led the Polish force through a winter gale into a deep wood where, upon defiantly proclaiming his deception, he was beaten to death. His captors then presumably froze to death in the forest depths, their plans frustrated, while the young Tsar Michael Fyodrovich Romanov calmly awaited his enthronement in the Ipatiev Monastery at Kostroma.

Glinka is regarded as the father of Russian classical music and Ivan Susanin was the first Russian opera to achieve international renown. After Emperor Nicholas I attended an early rehearsal, the composer changed its title to A Life for the Tsar, which was retained until the Russian Revolution. The opera’s popularity was established quickly; it had already achieved its five-hundredth performance in Russia by 1879, and it traditionally opened all new opera seasons in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Glory, Glory to our Russian Tsar functioned as a de facto second national hymn for the Russian Empire until 1917, and its performances in both its choral and instrumental variations on state occasions (particularly coronations) reflect the fusion of monarchy and nationality that, in addition to Orthodoxy, formed the pillars of the Russian state:

Glory, Glory to our Russian Tsar, To our sovereign, sent us by God! May your Imperial line live forever, May the Russian folk prosper through it!

In the middle of the nineteenth century, several other significant developments in Russian military music took place. The helicon tuba was invented in Russia sometime around 1845; and in 1866, Vasily Vasilyevich [Wilhelm&91; Wurm (*1826-†1904), a musician from Braunschweig-Lüneburg who played cornet à piston at the Imperial Theaters of St. Petersburg and served as music teacher to the future Tsar Alexander III, reorganized the bands of all Russian line infantry regiments. These new organizations, with compliments of 28 men each, were known in the army as “Wurm’s Brass Bands.” From 1869 to 1889, Wurm held the post of Chief Bandmaster and Inspector of the Bands of the Imperial Guard. He continued to teach at the St. Petersburg Conservatory until his death in 1904.

Bandsmen of an Infantry Regiment, Poland, 1890's.

Already by mid-century, Imperial Saint Petersburg was a city with a distinctly military atmosphere, embellished as it was during the reign of Alexander I with the construction of imposing parade grounds and vast squares framed by majestic palaces. Its garrison of over sixty thousand men (which constituted approximately one tenth of the city’s population) was made up of nine regiments of guard infantry and seven regiments of guard cavalry. The uniforms of uhlans, hussars, Cossacks and guards infantry of all ranks were omnipresent on the streets of the capital, and the daily parades and concerts by the bands of their respective regiments were a routine aspect of life in the glittering city on the Neva.

The reign of Emperor Alexander II (who ruled from 1855 until to 1881) was a period of successful Russian expansion in the Caucasus and Central Asia, but the empire's most significant victories were won in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78. That conflict witnessed the advance of Russian armies to the walls of Constantinople, the ancient Byzantium that Russians knew as Tsargrad, and the winning of independence for Bulgaria in a hard fought but successful campaign.

With the outbreak of the Serbo-Turkish War in 1876, pan-Slavic sentiment was inflamed in Russia as the ill-equipped Serbs battled their stronger and better equipped Ottoman foes. By the end of September 1876, approximately 1,850 Russian volunteers (644 of whom were officers) were serving in the Serbian army, and by 1877 the Russian Slavic committees had sent a total of 5000 volunteers to Serbia. Their efforts were helped by such artists as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who composed his famous Marche Slave, Op. 31 (originally titled Serbo-Russian March) to spur the recruitment of Russian volunteers for the Serb cause. Fyodor Hermann (a russified German who was active in music circles in St. Petersburg and Moscow) composed his March of the Russian Volunteers for the same purpose, and after the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, he wrote his Zabalkanskii March, Tottleben March and Russian Soldiers’ March, all of which he published in arrangements for piano.

Alexander II, who emancipated the Russian serfs in 1861, was assassinated by terrorists of the Narodnaya Volya ("People's Will") group in 1881, just as he was preparing to establish a constitution and parliament for the empire. He is revered in Bulgaria to this day as the "Tsar-Liberator of Russians and Bulgarians," and an equestrian statue of him was erected in Sofia in 1907 with a cenotaph in Old-Bulgarian script that reads "To the Tsar-Liberator, from Grateful Bulgaria."

Emperor Alexander III (who reigned from 1881 to 1894) was the son of the murdered Tsar; he ruthlessly crushed the forces of revolution at home, but kept Russia out of war abroad. Called the "Peacekeeper Tsar," he was also an enthusiastic student- and patron of music, particularly brass instruments. While still Tsarevich he had founded an amateur brass ensemble in which he played several wind instruments with a high degree of competence. These included the cornet, horn and tuba, upon each of which he is said to have personally performed the national anthem, God Save the Tsar. Alexander's amateur group became the “Court Band of Musicians” in 1882, albeit without the benefit of the Tsar's continued presence, for as reigning monarch he could no longer participate in its public performances. He still took an active interest in the group however, and as a convinced musical nationalist he decreed that only Russians could be members of "his" band, though russified Germans were accepted and eventually achieved prominence within its ranks.

From 1888, the Court Band was led by Hugo Ivanovich Varlikh (*1856-†1922), a native of Kassel who came from the opera company at Mannheim. He settled in Russia at the end of the 1870s, and from 1881 he conducted various orchestras in St. Petersburg. In 1897, the band was renamed the “Imperial Court Orchestra,” and from 1898 its members were required to wear a uniform and perform at all court festivities. Starting in 1902, Varlikh instituted a schedule of regular public concerts in the capital and at Peterhof. While leading the Court Orchestra, he arranged Russian folk songs and music from Tchaikovskii’s ballets Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty for brass, and also conducted premier performances of works by Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and other Russian composers. The Imperial Court Orchestra was renamed the Petrograd Philharmonic following the February 1917 Revolution, and Varlikh, though dismissed as its director, was later compelled to arrange music for propaganda pageants staged by the Bolsheviks. The Petrograd Philharmonic was renamed the Leningrad Philahrmonic Orchestra three days after the death of V.I. Lenin in 1924.

Staff Trumpeter of a Russian Line-Infantry Unit, 1900's.

Music in the Imperial Russian Navy dates from the reign of Peter I. In 1703, he ordered twenty-nine singers from the Moscow Royal Choir to be brought to the Admiralty in Saint Petersburg and trained in playing the oboe. When work on the Admiralty building commenced in 1704, the sounds of drums and oboes could be heard above the din of construction, and thus was born the custom of daily “Fore-Noon Concerts” concluding with a cannon shot -- fired precisely at twelve p.m. -- which were a fixture of old Saint Petersburg.

In 1711, this ensemble was officially renamed the “Chorus of the Admiralty Battalion,” which performed regularly in the new capital until it was disbanded in 1798 by an edict of the Emperor Paul. This was but a brief hiatus, for the establishment of a College of Naval Architecture was followed by the return of the “Chorus” as the musical ensemble of this institution. In the 1850’s, the College was relocated to the Fortress of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island that guarded the seaward approaches to Saint Petersburg, and all the band’s subsequent activity was indissolubly linked to that historic location.

In 1873, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (*1844-†1908), the renowned operatic composer, charter member of the Balakirev Circle and former Navy officer (as a cadet in 1863, he had sailed to New York on the Russian clipper Almaz), was named Inspector of Naval Bands. He standardized the instrumentation and training of Russian naval musicians and was one of the initiators of the Russian practice of providing all naval- and army band masters with a conservatory education. He also personally directed the reorganization and training of the navy bands based at Kronstadt, Nikolayev and Sevastopol, Russia's chief naval bases in the Baltic- and Black Seas. From 1875, he conducted concerts at Kronstadt featuring the massed bands of the Kronstadt and Saint Petersburg naval garrisons, which were staged for the benefit of Russian war invalids. It was for these performances that he composed his well-known Variations for Oboe and Military Band and his Konzertstück for Clarinet and Military Band. 

Rimsky-Korsakov, who produced many other compositions and arrangements for winds that have unfortunately been lost, was relieved as Inspector of Naval Bands when the office itself was abolished in 1884. In 1993, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the composer's birth, the Central Navy Band of Russia received the honorific title "N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov."

Russian Military Music in the Reign of Nicholas II

The Russian Army of 1913 consisted of 1.3 million men organized into 236 regiments of infantry (including 12 of the Imperial Guard, 16 Grenadier- and 208 Line regiments); 68 Regiments of Regular Cavalry (including twelve regiments of the Imperial Guard) and 2 Divisions of Ossete and Turcoman Horse; 70 Brigades of Field- and Rifle Artillery (including 3 of the Imperial Guard) and 16 rifle artillery divisions, plus fortress and support troops. The empire was divided into twelve military districts and one separate military province in the Don Cossack territories. All Cossacks enjoyed a special autonomous status within the empire and their thirteen voyskas or “hosts” -- the Don-, Terek-, Kuban-, Astrakhan-, Orenburg-, Ural-, Siberian-, Semyirechian-, Trans-Baikal-, Irkutsk-, Krasnoyarsk-, Amur- and Ussuri Voyskas - fielded 116 squadrons of cavalry in peacetime, which could be rapidly increased to up to 360 squadrons in wartime.

According to the army table of organization of 1913, each line infantry regiment fielded its own band consisting of 1 bugler (Hornist), 33 drummers (Barabanshchiki) and 35 bandsmen (Muzikanti), with the bugler and one drummer being permanently attached to regimental headquarters. Infantry regiments of the Imperial Guard with their special status and privileges had for centuries fielded much larger musical establishments of varying complements, depending upon their individual requirements. Russian Cavalry regiments (including Cossack units) fielded trumpet corps consisting of 19 trumpeters (Trubachi) each. All regimental buglers, trumpeters and bandsmen of line units were armed with sword bayonets and revolvers. It is notable that the complement of the Russian line infantry regiment band of 1913 was a rough equivalent to that of its Prussian counterpart of 1902.

Don Cossack Trumpet Corps of the Life-Guard Cossack 'His Majesty's' Regiment.

Each regiment of the army had its own set of songs, signals and parade marches, many of which were shared with other European armies. Regiments also possessed choirs, usually led by tenors who struck up the first couplets, with other members providing the refrain. Cossack cavalry units were especially renowned for their excellent vocalists and harmonies.

Regimental bandmasters were classified as civilian officials (Chinovniki dlya obucheniya muzikantov), but were required to pass a test that was comparable to the entrance examinations for military academies. Professional musicians and conductors of the highest caliber – often from the Imperial Theaters – were regularly tapped to staff and direct the bands of the Imperial Guard and other elite units, particularly those stationed in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Some of the talented civilians who had been so recruited included the conductor of the Garde Équipage band Voitsekh Ivanovich Glavach (*1849-†1911), who came from the Imperial Mariinsky Theater in Saint Petersburg and was a regular conductor at the concerts held at the Pavlovsk Station; August Karlovich Markvardt (*1882-†1915), who came to the 1st Sumskii Hussar Regiment in Moscow from the Bolshoi Theater Wind Band; and Vasily Georgievich [Willy&91; Brandt (*1869-†1923), a native of Coburg who was professor of trumpet at the Moscow Conservatory and held the post of conductor of the Alexander Military Institute Band at Moscow from 1908 to 1911.

Bandsmen were expected to perform at reviews conducted at fixed points of the military calendar, and in a country as deeply religious as Russia, military displays often centered around sacred festivals. Large winter parades were held every year in Saint Petersburg’s Palace Square to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), and other major military reviews took place on Easter Sunday, when the Emperor presented Easter greetings to his assembled troops and proclaimed Khristos Voskres! (Christ is risen!") to the massed regiments. Generally, the Tsar would open parades by reviewing his troops on horseback as bands played God Save the Tsar, shouting Zdorovo rebyata! (“Greetings, Children!”) to his men as he paused before each regiment, and immediately receiving the reply Zdravye zhelayem, Vashe Imperatorskoye Velichestvo! (“Good Health, Your Imperial Majesty!”) from thousands of throats.

Attendance at morning- and evening prayers, for which regimental- and/or ships’ choirs solemnly intoned the Orthodox liturgy, was compulsory for all ranks. The soldiers of the Tsar traditionally paid homage every year to two military saints - Saint George, patron saint of the army, whose feast was celebrated on 9 December, and Saint Andrew, patron saint of the navy (his cross was emblazoned on the Imperial Navy's ensign), whose feast took place on 13 December. For units stationed in the capital, church parade and military concerts at the Winter Palace were customary on these occasions, which were attended by the Tsar and the Chaplain-General of the Army and Fleet. The last incumbent of this office (from 1911 to 1917) was the "fighting priest" Father Georgy Ivanovich Shavelsky (*1871-†1951), who served in the front lines of the Russo-Japanese War and was wounded at the Battle of Liaoyang.

In 1901, Tsar Nicholas II revived the tradition of the "Spring Parade," which took place on May Day at the Field of Mars near the center of the capital, and every summer the Imperial Guard held large-scale maneuvers and a bivouac at Krasnoye Selo just south of the city. These always culminated in a spectacular military review with massed bands that took place in the splendid weather that Russians called “the Tsar’s sunshine.”

Major military reviews were also held to mark historically significant anniversaries that coincided with the twilight years of the empire. In 1909, crowds converged upon the Poltava battlefield for the bicentenary of the engagement that led to Russia's victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War. The ceremonies began with religious processions that took place on June 25; the next day, in the company of descendants of the generals who had served there under Peter I, the Tsar personally reviewed a gigantic march past of the regiments that had fought in the battle. Before them marched priests bearing the sacred icon that the Russian army had carried on the field two centuries earlier. 

The one-hundredth anniversary of the triumph over Napoleon was another state occasion that was observed with pomp and circumstance, and in September 1912 the Tsar and his family journeyed to Moscow to celebrate the Russian victory. The  commemoration included a solemn mass held on the battlefield of Borodino and a parade led by the Palace Grenadier Company, which was attired in the bearskin caps of Napoleon’s Old Guard. The review was followed by a reenactment of the battle in which forty thousand Russians had been killed or wounded.

A  shellac disc featuring a performance of the 'Kolonny March' by the Band of the Alexander Military Institute, Moscow. The Russian Gramophone Society, 1911.

In 1914, Russia was home to thirty-one cadet schools, each of which possessed its own military band or chorus. These institutions functioned under the tutelage of an Inspector General, the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich (1858-1915), a cousin of the Tsar who was a military man, a connoisseur of the arts and a poet known in the literary world under the nom de plume “K.R.” The band of the most famous of these schools, the Alexander Military Institute in Moscow, recorded a sizable body of material for the Russian Gramophone Society that is remarkable for the virtuosity displayed by its musicians and conductors, the foremost among these being the previously mentioned “Willy” Brandt. Russian military cadets were known jocularly as “The Beasts of Hell” and traditionally sang a humorous song that bore that title.

The premier formation of the Russian Navy during the final years of the Empire was the “Garde Équipage,” a unit for which the Tsar and Tsaritsa held particularly strong affection. The Gvardeisky Ekipazh or “Marine of the Guard” was the naval component of the Russian Imperial Guard, which was formed in 1867 when all Russian naval commands were reorganized into Rotas (companies), which in turn were combined into "Équipages" of approximately two thousand men each. The Garde Équipage provided officers and crews for the Imperial yachts Polar Star and Standart, a job which brought its personnel into regular and close personal contact with Emperor Nicholas, Empress Alexandra and their children.

Parade of the Garde Équipage before the Empress Alexandra and the Tsarevich Alexey, circa 1909.   Catherine Palace, Tsarskoye Selo.

It was customary for the Garde Équipage’s sixty-five-piece band to accompany the Tsar’s family on their yearly summer voyages, both to provide music for casual entertainments and to render military honors on state visits. The band’s conductor, the aforementioned Voitsekh Ivanovich Glavach (*1849-†1911) from the Imperial Mariinskii Theater in Saint Petersburg, was a Bohemian of Czech origin whose surname had been russified from Hlavach. His Coronation March-Hymn, composed for the May 1896 coronation of Nicholas II, is still extant, as are his choral works Hymn to Saints Cyril and Methodius (1885) and Hymn to Saint Vladimir (1888). Other Russian Naval units of the period, especially capital ships, possessed their own bands; one of the most famous of these from the "regular" navy was the light cruiser Varyag ("Viking"), which achieved fame in the Russo-Japanese War when it gave hopeless battle to a Japanese naval squadron in 1904 rather than surrender, entering the fray in full parade dress with guns blazing and its band playing God Save the Tsar and Glory, Glory to our Russian Tsar.

The Russo-Japanese War gave rise to several important compositions that remain immensely popular in Russian military band programs to this day. These include the waltzes Waves of the Amur by Maxim Avelevich Kyuss and On the Hills of Manchuria by Ilya Shatrov; also dating from this period is the march Longing for the Motherland (Toska po Rodine), published in 1905 under the name of the mysterious and elusive F. E. Kroup.

The circumstances surrounding the composition of On the Hills of Manchuria are of particular interest: This famous waltz, an important component of the canon of Russian patriotic song, was originally titled “The Mokshanskii Regiment on the Hills of Manchuria.” It was published in 1906 by Ilya Alexeyevich Shatrov (*1879-†1952), the bandmaster of that unit, in memory of his fallen comrades.

Shatrov was Kapellmeister of the 214th Mokshanskii Infantry Regiment when it was encircled by Japanese forces for eleven days during the 1905 Battle of Mukden, the largest land battle since Leipzig in 1813. With no hope of relief and its ammunition totally exhausted, the regiment launched a desperate bayonet charge through the Japanese lines and successfully rejoined the main body of the Russian forces, but at a terrible cost; over a two week period, it had lost thirty-three hundred men out of its normal complement of four thousand, one of whom was its regimental commander. Only seven members of the band (which had led the breakout with music playing and flags flying) survived, and in recognition of their valor they were each awarded the Cross of Saint George by the Tsar. Shatrov, who composed On the Hills of Manchuria while lying wounded in an army field hospital, was the most highly decorated of all the band's survivors. As a final distinction, the musicians of the Mokshanskii Regiment received from the Tsar a set of Silver Trumpets of Saint George - among the very last in Russian military history to be awarded.

A few years after Russia's disastrous war in the Far East, Vasily Ivanovich Agapkin (*1884-†1964) composed his signature march Farewell of Slavyanka, which is well-known even at military band concerts outside Russia. The son of a laborer, Agapkin was orphaned at the age of seven, and through fortuitous circumstances he was adopted by the Kapellmeister of a Russian regiment after the bandmaster had discovered the boy begging on the streets of a provincial town. Receiving a musical education courtesy of his adoptive family, Agapkin was so talented that he was eventually hailed as the finest cornet player in his step-father's regiment. 

In 1909 Agapkin moved to Tambov, where he became the staff trumpeter (Shtabs-Trubach) of a reserve cavalry regiment. While there, he wrote his most famous work, Farewell of Slavyanka, for the Balkan War of 1912 that was fought by Russia's ally Serbia; thanks to its evocation of both the sadness of parting and martial determination, the march was quickly taken to heart by the Russian people in the First- and above all the Second World Wars. It was used as the unofficial anthem of Admiral Alexander Kolchak's White Army in Siberia, but was also part of the standard parade repertoire of the Red Army. In today's Russia, the march is still played at military parades, and it is also used as the anthem of the Tambov Oblast where its composer had served as a soldier.

Tsar Nicholas II as Colonel-in-Chief of the Nizhni-Novgorod Dragoons.

By 1914, military bands were an established facet of everyday Russian life. They participated in army training and parades in garrison cities and towns, performed on state occasions, and provided music for military ceremonies. They even performed on the battlefield, for as late as the Russian Civil War it was not unusual for troops to go into battle with music playing. New traditions were established after the 1917 revolution, even as many of the older forms of Russian military music and ceremony - kept alive in exile, but presumed dead in Russia herself - reemerged piecemeal throughout three-quarters of a century of Soviet rule. Stalin revived the imperial cadet school tradition with the establishment of the first of the Soviet Army's Suvorov Military Schools in  the 1940's, symbolically housed in the Vorontsov Palace in Leningrad, former headquarters of the Imperial Corps of Pages; and already by the 1970's, Soviet army- and navy bandsmen were recording textbook performances of the marches of the most aristocratic regiments of the Tsar's Imperial Guard. 

Today, the Presidential Guard of the Russian Federation parades in uniforms of "Tsar's Green," with shakos emblazoned with the double-headed eagle of old Muscovy and the Romanovs. As of 2013, the Life-Guard Preobrazhensky Regiment has been reestablished as the "154th Preobrazhensky Independent Commandant's Regiment" with its garrison in Moscow.  

The power of tradition is such that further developments along these lines can be expected. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Admiralteiskii Orkestr Leningradskoi Voenno-Morskoi Baze. Admiralteiskii Orkestr Leningradskoi Voenno-Morskoi Baze. Sankt Peterburg: Admiralteiskii Orkestr Leningradskoi Voenno-Morskoi Baze, 2006.

Bakst, James. A History of Russian-Soviet Music. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1966.

Imperial General Staff. Handbook of the Russian Army, Sixth Edition. London: War Office, 1914.

Iroshnikov, Mikhail P., Yury B. Shelayev, et al. Before the Revolution: St. Petersburg in Photographs, 1890-1914. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1991.

King, Greg. The Court of the Last Tsar: Pomp, Power and Pageantry in the Reign of Nicholas II. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006.

Littauer, Vladimir S. Russian Hussar: A Story of the Imperial Cavalry 1911-1920. London: J.A. Allen & Co., 1965.

Lyons, Marvin and Andrew Wheatcroft, Ed. Nicholas II, The Last Tsar. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974.

Mantulin, Valentin N. The Russian Warrior's Songbook, 1721-1921: A Collection of Seamen's, Cossack, Regimental, Volunteer Unit, Military Academy and Cadet Songs, including the Anthems which were most frequently sung in the Imperial Army and Navy. Pearl River, New York: Valentin N. Mantulin, 1970.

Mollo, Boris and John Mollo. Uniforms of the Imperial Russian Army. Poole, Dorset: Blandford Press, 1979.

Rimsky-Korsakoff, Nikolay Andreyevich. My Musical Life. Translated From the Revised Second Russian Edition by Judah A. Joffe. New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1935

State Hermitage Museum and State Archive of the Russian Federation. Nicholas and Alexandra, The Last Imperial Family of Tsarist Russia: Catalogue of the Exhibition Nicholas and Alexandra. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.

Tarr, Edward H. East Meets West: The Russian Trumpet Tradition from the Time of Peter the Great to the October Revolution, with a Lexicon of Trumpeters Active in Russia from the Seventeenth Century to the Twentieth. Bucina: The Historical Brass Society Series No. 4. Hillsdale, New York: Pendragon Press, 2003.

Toeche-Mittler, Joachim. Armeemärsche, Band III: Die Geschichte unserer Marschmusik. Neckargemünd: Kurt Vowinckel Verlag, 1975.

Troyat, Henri. Daily Life in Russia under the Last Tsar. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961.

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The Panzergrenadier-Division 'Grossdeutschland' of the Wehrmacht and its associated units trace their origins to the Wachtruppe, the ceremonial guard formation of the Reichswehr that kept the traditions of the Kaiser's army alive in Weimar-era Berlin.

According to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles of 28 June 1919, the Weimar Republic was compelled by the victors of the First World War to reduce its armed forces to a strength of just 100,000 men. This left Germany with a military establishment that was both a fraction of the size of that with which she had gone to war in 1914, and wholly inadequate for the defense of the Reich from internal- and external threats.

During the reign of the Hohenzollern emperors, the Prussian Garde-Korps in and around Berlin had seen to the defense of the German imperial government and to ceremonial duties in the capital, but as a result of Versailles this institution was also abolished. The need for a unit to fulfill its functions remained more urgent than ever in light of the political chaos prevailing in postwar Germany, and in the spring of 1921 the Reichswehr Heeresleitung ordered the establishment of an army Wachregiment with headquarters in Berlin.

According to its table of organization, the Wachregiment was be made up of single companies (with supporting machine gun- and field-artillery batteries) that would be deployed to the capital on a rotating basis from each of the Reichswehr’s seven territorially-based infantry divisions. It was also stipulated that these units would serve three-month tours, during which time they would turn out for ceremonial functions and remain in readiness to defend the republican government if the need arose. Almost immediately, the Versailles powers condemned this supposed "creation" of a new regiment as a treaty violation, even though it was to be constituted from existing forces; accordingly, in June 1921 the Wachregiment was redesignated Kommando der Wachtruppe, an appellation that attracted no further protest from the Allies.

The Wachtruppe was quartered in the barracks of the former 4. Garde-Regiment zu Fuss on Rathenower-Strasse in Berlin-Moabit and its senior officer (initially an Oberstleutnant) was designated the military commander of the city of Berlin. Though no one suspected it at the time, the Wachtruppe was the nucleus of the many units that would one day bear the name Grossdeutschland and constitute the elite of the German army of the Second World War. 

As a prerequisite for carrying out its ceremonial duties, the Wachtruppe's organization provided for a band that according to custom was subordinated directly to its 'regimental' headquarters staff. Throughout most of its career, and despite the many permutations its parent unit would undergo in the ensuing decades, this Musikkorps would be led and guided by the seasoned army musician and Kapellmeister Friedrich Ahlers.

Friedrich Ahlers as Stabmusikmeister, 1940

Friedrich Ahlers was born on 9 June 1882 in Luthe, near Wunstorf/Hanover, to Friedrich and Sophie Eleonore Luise Ahlers. His father, the conductor of the municipal orchestra of Wunstorf, exerted a strong musical influence on his son, who mastered the piano and flute while he was still a youngster. In 1901, the already musically informed Ahlers entered military service as a Hoboist in the 1. Hannoversches Infanterie Regiment Nr. 74 at Hanover. After studying music at the Prussian Royal Music Academy in Berlin-Charlottenburg, he passed the examination for Musikmeister in 1913 and was named conductor of the Musikkorps of the Colbergsches Grenadierregiment 'Graf Gneisenau' Nr. 9 at Stargard/Pomerania in 1914. After the outbreak of the First World War, Ahlers served on both the Eastern- and Western Fronts, and following the armistice in 1918, he returned to his garrison in Stargard.

Among the select few to remain on active duty after the reduction of the German army to its Versailles-mandated strength, Ahlers was assigned to the expansion batallion of Infanterie-Regiment 5 at Greifswald in August 1920. Ten months later, in June 1921, he and three musicians from that regiment were transferred to Berlin with orders to establish a band for the newly created Wachtruppe. Drawing heavily on the Musikkorps of the 9. Preussisches Infanterie-Regiment at nearby Spandau (colloquially known as 'Regiment Graf Neun' due to the many aristocrats within its ranks), Ahlers requisitioned new personnel for the band of the Wachtruppe until it attained its initial regulation complement of twenty-four musicians.

The first appearance by a guard company of the Wachtruppe with music took place in Berlin on 11 August 1921 during the festivities honoring the adoption of the Weimar constitution. Another milestone in the history of the band was reached on 20 September 1921, when Musikmeister Ahlers led the first ceremonial changing of the guard to take place on Unter den Linden since the end of the First World War - a ritual that was to go on with few interruptions for the next twenty-four years. As the most visible unit of the Reichswehr, the Wachtruppe with its band would participate in all the important ceremonies of the early Weimar Republic, including the “loyalty parade” before General von Seeckt after the 1923 Munich Putsch and the swearing in of Reich President Paul von Hindenburg in 1925.

From the outset, the Wachtruppe and its musicians were conscious of their role as the successors to the Prussian Garde-Korps and thus their obligations as heirs to a venerable military tradition. In 1921, Ahlers had chosen the march of the former 4. Garde-Regiment zu Fuss - the Defilermarsch (AM II, 168) by Carl Faust - as the  parade march of the Wachtruppe. In 1927, in another step that reaffirmed the ties of the  representational formation of the Reichswehr to its predecessors, the Schellenbaum or “Jingling Johnnie” formerly carried by the 3. Garde-Regiment zu Fuss was formally conferred upon the Wachtruppe.

Some of Ahlers’ colleagues had nicknamed him Der Kalk von Potsdam (“The Limestone of Potsdam”) for what they considered his surfeit of musical conservatism, yet they respected him as an uncompromising champion of the German martial music tradition. It could never be said that he did not know what he wanted from his musicians, or that he did not know how to get it, though his perfectionism sometimes drove his subordinates to their limits. “Playing under Ahlers was not always a simple matter,” recalled one of his former bandsmen, Joachim Toeche-Mittler, in 1966. “He heard every note, even when marching in front of us. Woe to us if something wasn’t right. He would come to a halt and let the band march past him on both sides, until he saw the guilty party and gave him a look of such annoyance that the breath was almost knocked out of him. When everything got moving again though, he would revel in fine playing and push back the hand guard of his sword with his left hand, giving an ‘eyes right’ toward the house windows where the Berliners were waiting to hear ‘their’ military music.”

For the Wachtruppe and its successors, the full-dress guard-changing ceremonies in Berlin followed the same route every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday from September 1921 to early 1945. The Wachkompagnie would depart from its barracks in Moabit and proceed over the Moltke Bridge past the old General Staff Building and the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and then along Unter den Linden to the Memorial to the German dead of the First World War located in the Doric-columned Neue Wache or “New Guardhouse.” 

Berlin, 1931: The band of the Wachtruppe on Tiergartenstrasse

At the very front of the guard detachment marched the Tambourmajor, leading the fifers and drummers of the Spielmannszug, followed in succession by the Musikmeister and Schellenbaum-bearer who marched at the head of the Musikkorps. Behind the band came the officer-of-the-watch on horseback, and bringing up the rear with shouldered arms came the troops of the Wachkompagnie. Starting in the mid-'thirties, guard duty at the War Memorial would be shared with formations of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine on special occasions, but in the main this function remained the privilege and preserve of the Army until the fall of Berlin in 1945.

By 1924, conditions in the country seemed to have stabilized and the 42-year-old Ahlers felt ready to start a family. He married the 25-year-old Dorothea Timm and the couple settled down to a comfortable life in Berlin, relocating several times until, in 1936, they arrived at their home at No. 3 Rathenower-Strasse a mere two hundred meters from the Wachtruppe barracks. Friedrich and Dorothea Ahlers would go on to have two daughters and by all accounts, the strict and exacting bandmaster was a kind and loving father to his children.

The guard-changing ceremonies and parades in which Musikmeister Ahlers and the Wachtruppe’s band participated drew many visitors to the capital, and to the Berliners themselves these displays were a normal yet essential part of the Berliner Luft. Outdoor recitals by the Wachtruppe band at the Berlin Zoo were always well attended and concert programs from that period catalogue the eclectic and wide-ranging repertoire mastered by Ahlers and his musicians. This included not only the expected military marches, but also the classics; among the latter, the works of German and Austrian composers naturally predominated, but such composers as Dvorak, Mussorgsky, Grieg, Rossini and Bizet were also represented. These halcyon years of the Weimar Republic were personally and professionally good for Ahlers; he was honored with a promotion to Obermusikmeister in 1929 in recognition of his achievements in organizing and training the Wachtruppe band.

After the National Socialists assumed power in 1933, the Reich government began a program of rebuilding German military forces, and as bandmaster of the army’s premier ceremonial unit (which was renamed Wachtruppe Berlin in 1934), Ahlers’ work schedule was full. From the proclamation of conscription in 1935 to the countless state visits, parades and tattoos staged during this period - among them a colossal performance of the Grosser Zapfenstreich during the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin - Ahlers conducted continuously. He led his musicians on such occasions as the 1937 celebrations honoring the seven-hundredth anniversary of Berlin, Hitler’s return to the capital after the Anschluss of Austria and the return of the Condor Legion from Spain in 1939. Not to be forgotten was the participation by Ahlers and the Wachtruppe band in the “International Military Music Gathering” at Turin in September 1934, the first assembly of world military bands to take place since the Great War.

On 1 May 1936, Ahlers was promoted to Stabsmusikmeister and the complement of the Wachtruppe’s band was increased to forty-seven musicians. It is interesting to note that at this time, according to army regulations of 1936 (HV 36, Nr. 356) the three rank grades now held by all German military band conductors – Musikmeister, Obermusikmeister or Stabsmusikmeister – did not accord their incumbents officer’s rank as such, but rather the status of “military official with officer’s rank.”

In June 1937, the Wachtruppe Berlin was officially renamed Wachregiment Berlin, and in June 1939 it was reinforced and renamed yet again as the Infanterie-Regiment Grossdeutschland (“Greater Germany”). No mere invention of the National Socialists, the honorific Grossdeutschland was both descriptive and symbolic of a longstanding current of German history. The term itself originated with the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 and the unsuccessful attempts to peacefully unify all the German States - including the German-inhabited lands of the Habsburg Empire - in a constitutional monarchy of “Greater Germany.” The Infanterie-Regiment Grossdeutschland accordingly continued the Wachtruppe's custom of recruiting its personnel from all of the country’s military districts (which now included the Austrian and Sudeten territories that had been incorporated into 'Grossdeutschland' in 1938), while most of the army’s other regiments were still recruited territorially. 

At this time, with an eye on future expansion of the regiment, a second Musikkorps under Musikmeister Guido Grosch was established and official duties were henceforth split between the two bands. Grosch, who was born in Berlin on 25 June 1910, came to the Wachregiment from the band of the Heeresunteroffizierschule at Potsdam-Eiche. 

Musikmeister Guido Grosch

With the outbreak of the Second World War on 1 September 1939, Infanterie-Regiment 'GD' was mobilized and shipped to a deployment area in Silesia for a projected air-landing operation that was ultimately canceled. When its unbloodied troops returned to Berlin after a few days, the unsuspecting Berliners hailed 'their' embarrassed Landsers as returning heroes. Later, in November 1939, the lion’s share of the regiment (including Ahlers and the 1st Musikkorps) departed for training in western Germany, while a remnant stayed in the capital with Guido Grosch and the 2nd Musikkorps as Wachkompanie Berlin. By 1 April 1940, this unit had been enlarged, renamed Wachbataillon Berlin and placed under the command of Major von Boguslawski, under whose leadership it continued to perform ceremonial duties and maintain the traditions of GD.

The 1st Musikkorps participated in the French campaign of 1940, accompanying GD (which was organized as a reinforced motorized-infantry regiment) in two buses, though Stabsmusikmeister Ahlers was assigned his own car. As the regiment forced the Meuse near Sedan and fought in the battles for the Weygand Line, its musicians, who according to international custom were classed as non-combatants, served as stretcher-bearers and messengers. After the French armistice, Ahlers and his band staged concerts at Lyon and Colmar, and practiced for the grand victory parade in Paris that Hitler ultimately canceled due to misgivings about possible British air raids and even a desire to spare the feelings of the French.

While Ahlers and his Musikkorps remained in France through the second half of 1940, Wachbataillon Berlin was called on to furnish an honor guard for a curious but crucial event, namely the diplomatically disastrous state visit to Berlin of Soviet Foreign Minister Vyatcheslav Molotov. On 12 November, as Molotov's train arrived at the Anhalter Bahnhof (which in surreal fashion was bedecked with swastikas and the Soviet hammer and sickle), Musikmeister Grosch and his band struck up the Internationale, the then-Soviet national anthem. Due to the concern of German officials that spectators and passers-by in what was formerly 'Red' Berlin might start singing along with this officially forbidden communist hymn, Grosch drastically increased the tempo of his performance to get this necessary but distasteful concession to Bolshevism over with as soon as possible. Less than two weeks later, Wachbataillon Berlin's band was again called upon to render military honors to another foreign visitor: the Romanian chief of state Marshal Ion Antonescu. As was the case with Molotov's visit (though for different reasons), the appearance of the Conducator in the German capital was yet another foreshadowing of the titanic struggle soon to break out in the East.

In the meantime, Infanterie-Regiment GD saw its next action in the south-east in the Spring of 1941. With the start of the Balkan Campaign on 11 April, the unit advanced swiftly into Yugoslavia from staging areas in Romania, but it saw very little actual fighting. Upon its arrival in Belgrade, Oberleutnant “Maxe” Fabich of GD's 1st Battalion / 3rd Company was ordered to assist the Propaganda-Company technicians who were engaged in putting the facilities of the former Yugoslav state radio service back into operation; thus was born the Soldatensender-Belgrad. The station's first broadcast took place on 19 April 1941 and it was produced by Fabich, who also played the piano on the air. During the next few weeks, performances by Ahlers and GD's band were broadcast live over the Soldatensender and the two soldiers’ choruses of GD’s 1st Battalion sung Soldatenlieder for an enthusiastic and growing audience. The Belgrade station soon became known for closing its broadcast day with Norbert Schultze's and Hans Leip's Lili-Marleen, the song that became its trademark and a favorite among German and Western Allied troops of the Second World War.

In mid-June 1941, GD was suddenly transferred to Poland and assigned to billets at Żelechów near Dęblin, while Ahlers himself was appointed commandant of the nearby estate of Podzamcze. The Wehrmacht was completing its final preparations for war with the USSR, and GD was assigned to the operational reserve of Heinz Guderian’s Panzergruppe II. Finally, at 0330 on Sunday 22 June 1941, as thousands of guns roared along a front stretching from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, Operation Barbarossa was launched.

In this campaign that would prove unlike any other they had hitherto experienced, the personnel of Ahlers’ Musikkorps served as stretcher-bearers and guarded the regimental baggage train. They would remain away from the front throughout the Wehrmacht’s eastward advance and throughout the grim defensive fighting of the coming winter, but when Infanterie-Regiment Grossdeutschland was elevated to the status of a motorized infantry division in April 1942, Ahlers and his bandsmen moved up to their comrades’ positions northwest of Kursk and honored the occasion with a field performance of the Grosser Zapfenstreich, complete with torchbearers. Later, during the early stages of the 1942 German summer offensive codenamed "Operation Blue" that saw GD advance up to the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, the band was tasked with performing at military hospitals behind the front.

Guido Grosch remained in Berlin with his Musikkorps until the summer of 1942, when he was sent to Russia with orders to assume the post of executive officer with Infanterie-Regiment GD 1 and to relieve Ahlers and other elderly members of his band. On 19 September 1942, the 32-year-old Grosch was killed by a Russian sniper while enjoying a rare shave in his trench in the embattled Rzhev sector; some of the fallen Musikmeister's comrades opined at the time that the small mirror he was using to shave reflected the light and marked him out as a clear target for the Soviet marksman. He was succeeded in January 1943 by Obermusikmeister Fritz Masuhr from the engineers’ band at Königsberg/East Prussia, who would lead the Musikkorps of the soon-to-be-renamed Panzergrenadier-Division Grossdeutschland through the end of 1944.

'Papa Hoernlein,' Division Commander GD (center) with Ahlers (right) 

On leaving the front, Ahlers brought some of the division's best musicians back to Berlin with him. The Wachbataillon’s band already included numerous performers who had been professional musicians in civilian life, including Heinz Munsonius and Kurt Drabeck, whose names were well known in the world of dance music. The Panzer-Grenadier Division GD had long fielded its own company of front-line entertainers, including several noncommissioned officers who were first class tenors, others who were fine violinists, and even an enlisted man who was a talented composer: Obergefreiter Hans-Martin Majewski. Majewski composed the melodies of the songs Grossdeutsche Grenadiere and Landser und Panzer in 1940 (both of which were recorded by Ahlers for Telefunken), as well as GD’s own late-war campaign song, Highway Nights, in 1944. The latter featured lyrics by GD Unteroffizier Nürnberger that described the combat conditions in the East in all their unvarnished severity, and there is no reason to think that Reich Propaganda Minister Goebbels would have found the piece especially useful, assuming that he even knew of its existence.

Effective 1 October 1942, Wachbataillon Berlin was redesignated Wachbataillon Grossdeutschland, and as the war dragged on into 1943, Ahlers and his Musikkorps had a full duty schedule staging morale-boosting concerts for the civil population and soldiers home on leave. In the “Broadcast Hall No. 1” of Berlin’s main radio station, where radio personality Heinz Goedecke had formerly hosted the weekly “Request Concert,” the band made regular appearances, and Ahlers also conducted the special late-night performances broadcast live to ships on the high seas. In the autumn of 1943, he and his musicians embarked upon a concert tour of the Warthegau that included Gnesen and Posen, where they performed at the trade fair that was in progress. During this period, it also fell to the Wachbataillon’s band to play at the mass-funerals held for civilians killed in the increasingly heavy Allied air attacks on Berlin, including the burial at Stahnsdorf of the nearly three thousand victims of the devastating raids of 21-22 November 1943.

Now over sixty years of age, Ahlers' non-stop routine inevitably took a toll on his health, and on 28 May 1944 he was hospitalized at Berlin-Tempelhof after suffering a mild heart attack. The resulting slack was taken up by the band of Panzergrenadier-Division GD under Musikmeister Masuhr, which had been withdrawn from Russia in March 1944 and had started its own morale-building tour of Germany by performing for armaments workers in Hamburg and Bremen.

The attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944 caught the Wachbataillon, like the German public, completely off guard. Confusion reigned in the capital on that sweltering summer day; the unit and its bandsmen were mobilized by the prearranged signal “Valkyrie” that had been issued by Graf von Stauffenberg's men, and they were dispatched to secure the government quarter from the "party fanatics" who had ostensibly just murdered Hitler. The commander of the Wachbataillon Major Otto Remer (who was unaware of what was happening) was sent to arrest Dr. Joseph Goebbels, but after speaking personally with Adolf Hitler via the propaganda minister’s telephone, he obeyed orders to suppress the rising.

The events of 20 July reverberated throughout the remaining months of the war and require no recounting here, though Ahlers and his band did figure in one of the postscripts to that day. On 6 October 1944, in a grueling one day round trip, they were brought by rail from Berlin to the Tannenberg Memorial in East Prussia to play at the state funeral of Hitler’s Wehrmacht Adjutant General der Infanterie Rudolf Schmundt. This officer who had always championed the interests of Grossdeutschland at Führer Headquarters (and indeed had even secured Hitler's authorization for the institution of the Grossdeutschland cuff-band) had finally succumbed after weeks of agony to the wounds he sustained from Stauffenberg's bomb.

One of Ahlers' wartime recordings, 1943

As the military situation continued to deteriorate for Germany, cost-cutting measures were instituted throughout the entire armed forces, and on 13 September 1944 the Chief of the General Staff ordered the dissolution of all army divisional Musikkorps, among them Panzer Grenadier-Division 'GD’s' band under Masuhr. It was decreed that henceforth only the bands controlled by the commandants of the large cities - including Berlin - would be retained. Numerous younger conductors suddenly became available, and in light of his age and uncertain health Ahlers was replaced in early November by the 39-year-old Obermusikmeister Hans Borghoff, who came from the Musikkorps of the 16th Panzer Division. Borghoff had studied in Berlin from 1937 to 1939 and was already personally acquainted with many of the musicians in the capital.

On 10 November 1944, after 43 years as a soldier and over 30 years since his promotion to Musikmeister, Ahlers officially handed his Musikkorps’ instruments, scores and files over to his successor. The new commander of the Wachregiment GD (for the Wachbataillon GD had been upgraded to a regiment on 1 October 1944), Knight’s Cross holder Oberstleutnant Lehnhoff, organized a farewell ceremony for Ahlers in which his band turned out in his presence for one final concert. Fifty-five bandsmen and their new conductor stood at attention and then began a performance that included all of Ahlers’ favorite marches, including the Yorckscher Marsch (AM II, 37, HM II, 5) by Ludwig van Beethoven, the Radetzky Marsch (AM II, 45, HM II, 35) by Johann Strauss the Elder and the Regimentsgruss (HM II, 4) by Heinrich Steinbeck. The finale was a bravura performance of Carl Faust’s Defiliermarsch (AM II, 168, HM II, 50), the parade march of the Infanterie-Regiment Grossdeutschland that had been chosen by Ahlers for the Wachtruppe over two decades before.

During his short-lived retirement, Ahlers played with his two little girls (now aged 12 and 8) and entertained them on the piano, putting on a cheerful face for his children even as he monitored the Red Army's westward advance and pondered what that would ultimately mean for his family and his country. In a final clutching at the last shreds of normalcy, guard parades still took place in the bomb-blasted streets of Berlin, concerts were given and, in keeping with the times, funeral parades were conducted. The Soviet juggernaut rolled inexorably toward the capital until finally, as the last barrier on the Oder disintegrated and the combined forces of two Soviet Army Groups stormed the city, the bandsmen of Wachregiment GD were thrown into the desperate struggle as riflemen. When it was over, Obermusikmeister Borghoff and the survivors of the band bade farewell to the ruins of their Kaserne in Moabit and went into Soviet captivity.

In the early days of May 1945, Red Army troops broke into the Ahlers home on Rathenower Strasse and, finding the old bandmaster’s uniform, proceeded to burn his house to the ground. Ahlers himself was taken away by the Soviets for questioning, but (unusually under the circumstances) he was returned to his now homeless but relieved wife and children two days later.

Was this unexpected reprieve a bow on the Soviets’ part to Ahlers’ reputation as a musician? Or was it granted in preparation for their soon-to-be implemented program of enlisting renowned German artists to serve cultural policy in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany? Such a question is by no means unreasonable, given the preferential treatment the Soviets accorded to actors like Paul Wegener (despite his having starred in several of Goebbels’ big-screen historical epics) or to the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, whom they had unsuccessfully attempted to “recruit” before his death in his Silesian home in 1946. What is clear is that Ahlers and his family lived in the same desperate straits as millions of other Germans in the summer of 1945, which indicates his probable response to any offers of collaboration the Soviets may have made.

In occupied Berlin, the Ahlers family scraped by for six months. Frau Ahlers embarked on daily food foraging trips from the temporary shelter they soon found on Rathenower-Strasse, while Friedrich Ahlers himself obtained permission from the new authorities to start a small orchestra to provide musical instruction to children. On 9 November 1945, as he was hurrying to an appointment with this modest ensemble, he collapsed and died on the steps of the radio station on the Masurenallee.

Friedrich Ahlers was buried in the Lutheran cemetery of St. Johannis und Heiland in Berlin/Plötzensee. His successor in Wachregiment Grossdeutschland, Obermusikmeister Borghoff, endured years of Soviet captivity in the Gulag at Cheropovets, where he established a camp choir that made a name for itself among its fellow prisoners, despite a lack of instruments, music scores and even pen and paper. Obermusikmeister Fritz Masuhr of the band of Panzer-Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland later belonged to the organizational committee for the establishment of military bands in the German Federal Armed Forces, and his last assignment was that of Music Inspector of the Bundeswehr from 1968 to 1975. Obergefreiter Hans-Martin Majewski went on to a career as a composer of film-music in the German Federal Republic, creating the musical soundtracks of such postwar features as Die Brücke (1958) and Nacht fiel über Gotenhafen (1959).

Friedrich Ahlers and Guido Grosch left a large body of recorded work behind them, and this material provides a vital link to events that that will hopefully never be repeated, but which nevertheless shaped the age in which we live. Their world, like our own, was replete with examples of both the best and worst in human nature.

Ahlers (far right) leading the band of IR Grossdeutschland, 1940

Bibliography:

Read, Anthony and David Fisher. The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin and the Nazi-Soviet Pact, 1939-1941. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988.

Scheibert, Horst. Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland: A Pictorial History with Text and Maps. Translated by Gisele Hockenberry. Edited by Bruce Culver. Carrollton, TX: Squadron/Signal Publications, 1987.

Schlicht, Adolf und John R. Angolia. Die Deutsche Wehrmacht: Uniformierung und Ausrüstung, Band 1: Das Heer. Stuttgart: Motorbuch Verlag, 1996.

Spaeter, Helmuth. The History of Panzerkorps Grossdeutschland. 3 Vols. Translated by David Johnston. Winnipeg: JJ Fedorowicz, 1992-2000.

Toeche-Mittler, Joachim. Armeemärsche: Ein historische Plauderei zwischen Regimentsmusiken und Trompeterkorps rund um die deutsche Marschmusik. Neckargemünd: Kurt Vowinckel-Verlag, 1966.

Toeche-Mittler, Joachim. Musikmeister Ahlers: Ein Zeitbild unserer Militärmusik, 1901-1945. Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1981.

Woche, Klaus-Rainer. Vom Wecken bis zum Zapfenstreich: Die Geschichte der Garnison Berlin, 2. Auflage. Berg am Starnberger See: Kurt Vowinckel-Verlag, 1998.

We acknowledge the invaluable information that was contributed to this article and our CD Grossdeutschland: Von der Wachtruppe zum Panzerkorps by individual members of the Traditionsgemeinschaft Panzer-Korps 'Grossdeutschland'- und 'Brandenburg' Verbände. Our conversations and correspondence with these highly knowledgeable sources provided us with priceless anecdotal- and specialized information that would have otherwise remained inaccessible to us.    

Further reading: Infantry Regiment Grossdeutschland

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